Favorite films that had a one-week run in NYC during 2014. In order of preference. (The complete list can be found at Letterboxd.)

The Immigrant (James Gray)

The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zurcher)

Jealousy (Philippe Garrel)

What Now? Remind Me (Joaquim Pinto)

Norte, The End of History (Lav Diaz)

Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard)

Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt)

Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang)

The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann)

Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi)

Favorite As-Yet Undistributed Features

Hopefully at least half of these will make their way into theaters in 2015. In order of preference.

Horse Money (Pedro Costa)

Phoenix (Christian Petzold)

Amour Fou (Jessica Housner)

Episode of the Sea (Siebren de Haan and Lonnie van Brummelen)

Tu dors Nicole (Stéphane LaFleur)

De la musique ou La jota de Rosset (Jean-Charles Fitoussi)

Sentimental Education (Julio Bressane)

Pasolini (Abel Ferrara)

How to Disappear Completely (Raya Martin)

Approaching the Elephant (Amanda Wilder)

Favorite New Experimental Shorts

Putting these lists together has made me realize that I need to make a habit of going to Rotterdam. In alphabetical order.

Deorbit (Makino Takashi & Telecosystems)

Dot Matrix (Richard Tuohy)

The Innocents (Jean-Paul Kelly)

Konrad & Kurfurst (Esther Urlus)

New Fancy Foils (Jodie Mack)

Photooxidation (Pablo Mazzolo)

Red Capriccio (Blake Williams)

Sea Series #9, 11, 12, 13, 14 (John Price)

A Study in Natural Magic (Charlotte Pryce)

Sun Song (Joel Wanek)

Favorite Discoveries

Older films I saw for the first time this year, limited to one film per director. In alphabetical order.

D’Annunzios Höhle (Heinz Emigholz, 2005)

Gideon of Scotland Yard (John Ford, 1958)

The Goddess (Yonggang Wu, 1934)

The Great Flamarion (Anthony Mann, 1945)

Lars Ole 5.C (Nils Malmros, 1973)

Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984)

Rivette – The Night Watchman (Claire Denis, 1990)

The Spy in Black (Michael Powell, 1939)

Tchoupitoulas (Bill Ross and Turner Ross, 2012)

Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934)

]]>http://www.longpauses.com/best-films-of-2014/feed/0Horse Money (2014)http://www.longpauses.com/horse-money/
http://www.longpauses.com/horse-money/#commentsTue, 25 Nov 2014 02:33:16 +0000http://www.longpauses.com/?p=3924In 2007, soon after a screening of Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth at the San Francisco International Film Festival, I went for a long walk through Golden Gate Park and decided on a whim to explore the de Young Museum. I don’t remember much about the visit except for the 20 minutes I spent standing in front of Aaron Douglas’s Aspiration (1936). (I wrote at length about that experience here.) I was overwhelmed by the uncanny similarities between his brand of Modernism and Costa’s, and I’ve had it in the back of my mind ever since to write an essay drawing a line between the two. If I do it would eventually pass through a number of African-American novelists and the anonymous designers of so many funk, soul, and jazz album covers. That essay seems even more necessary now that Costa is being accused of “aestheticizing poverty.”

That Claire Denis had made a film noir came as little surprise. Denis is a classic auteur in the sense that, throughout her 25-year career, her visual style and thematic preoccupations have remained remarkably consistent, regardless of subject or genre. She’s made family dramas, music and dance documentaries, a coming-of-age story, a horror tale, and a variety of films that defy simple classification. Adding a noir to that list made sense. However, the pitch darkness of Bastards, its near-total nihilism and its treatment of sexual violence, caught many critics and viewers off guard. Reviews were mixed coming out of Cannes, where it premiered in Un Certain Regard, and even Denis’s strongest advocates (I’d include myself among them) have been slower than usual to fully embrace it. Bastards is indeed a hard film to love. It’s wicked, painful, and soul-sick. It’s also the best new release I saw in 2013.

Bastards opens with a suicide and with a dreamlike image of a young woman walking naked through a vacant Paris street. In her typically elliptical fashion, Denis spends the next 90 minutes piecing together the two events. If there is a single defining characteristic of Denis’s cinema, it’s her subjective camera, and here she adopts the perspective of the suicide’s brother-in-law, Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon), a sea captain who abandons his ship to return home and care for his sister and niece. We in the audience know only what Marco knows — that the family’s manufacturing business is in ruins, that his brother-in-law was deeply indebted to local tycoon Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor), and that his niece Justine (Lola Créton) has been hospitalized. The rest is a puzzle to be solved in classic noir style, complete with fistfights, fast cars, and a seductive femme fatale (Raphaëlle Laporte, played by Chiara Mastroianni). Marco is Denis’s rendition of the kind of character Toshiro Mifune played in Akira Kurosawa’s films: battle-tested and honor-bound but still open and exposed. The film is so emotionally brutal because we discover each new horror alongside Marco, as if we’re supporting a grieving friend at the graveside.

I saw Bastards two nights in a row at the Toronto International Film Festival. After the first screening, I was shocked by the bitterness and despair; after the second, I was overwhelmed by the sorrow. It’s an essential distinction, I think. Bastards is Denis’s most Lynchian film: the story echoes Twin Peaks, certain scenes and characters recall Lost Highway, and the style of the film reminds me at times of Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. (Bastards is Denis’s first narrative feature shot on digital, as Inland Empire was for Lynch.) But more than anything else it’s that moral distinction between despair and sorrow that makes this a Lynchian film. Darkness, nihilism, anxiety — these are relatively easy conditions to reproduce on screen. Lynch has an innate and uncanny talent for expressing the transcendent loss that inevitably accompanies violence and human tragedy. That is what Denis taps into here.

Bastards ends with an ugly image of an ugly act, a father molesting his child. What makes it doubly horrific is that we’ve already seen this image many times before in the film. It’s become familiar, a gestural echo. Denis and cinematographer Agnes Godard are among contemporary cinema’s great portrait artists. They shoot in intimate close-ups that make the actors’ bodies present and familiar. The final image, although desaturated and pixilated, is no exception. At the moment of violence, the father and child embrace and the film cuts to black, which summons retroactively every other embrace in the film: Marco holding Justine in the hospital and his own daughter in his apartment or Laporte taking his young son’s hand as they ride in a limo. Most devastating of all is a moment between Marco and Raphaëlle — he walks through a door, she grabs his jacket by the lapels and pulls it down off of his shoulders, they embrace — that Denis restages at the climax of the film, this time between Raphaëlle and her son. “The first taboo is incest,” Denis told Nick Pinkerton. “It’s the origin of the law.” The sorrow in Bastards is primal, eternal. It’s the poisoning of affection, the blaspheming of love.

Xavier Dolan’s films only occasionally rise above the level of pastiche. To watch I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats or Laurence Anyways (I haven’t yet seen Tom at the Farm) is to spend an hour or two sampling from the still-only-24-year-old’s favorite movies, music, and photographs. That’s a harsh critique, I know, but not an all-together damning one. Dolan is beginning to develop a voice, and already there are hints in his work that it will become something more than just a middlebrow, big-screen instantiation of mashup aesthetics. (Remember when we used to just explain this away as “postmodernism”?)Laurence Anyways is an impressive film and a marked improvement over his earlier work, both in terms of scale and execution. The two main characters, Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) and Fred (Suzanne Clément), exist outside of the self-contained, semi-autobiographical universe of I Killed My Mother and Heartbeats, and Dolan’s move into grand melodrama is both logical (he’s inserted himself, whether we like it or not, into the Sirk-Fassbinder line of queer cinema) and ambitious (I wasn’t expecting a three-hour film so soon).

The challenge when assessing a performance like Clément’s is that Dolan tends to use actors as cogs in the haphazard machinery of his images. As he swings from influence to influence — from Godard to Almodóvar to Alan Ball to MTV-era David Fincher and so on — his characters tend to get lost in the shuffle. Too often they’re forced to adopt new personae for each new visual context and, as a result, it all becomes a bit schizophrenic. Of all of Dolan’s lead performers, Poupaud suffers the most for this, I think. Even after several viewings of Laurence Anyways, I still don’t have a deep sense of Laurence’s psychology. I think I know what Dolan intended, I think I understand the character as he exists on the page, but Poupaud, a fine actor, wanders a bit. I put the blame for this squarely on Dolan, who loses control of the material at key moments. In the frenetic, all-secrets-revealed confrontation between Laurence and Fred, for example, Poupaud simply stares at Clément and then walks away. It’s a screenwriter’s cheat. Dolan settles for ambiguity instead of writing that necessary, difficult, and revealing next line. It reads as a failure of imagination — as if Dolan couldn’t fully understand Laurence in that moment and wanted to get out of the scene as quickly as possible. Problem is, it leaves Poupaud dangling on the hook.

All of which makes Clément’s accomplishment even more impressive. Fred is also an underwritten character with by-the-book motivations, and yet Clément’s performance is so charged, she throws the entire film out of balance. Most viewers, I assume, would describe Laurence Anyways as a film about a man whose decision to come out as a transvestite affects every area of his professional and personal life, most importantly his relationship with Fred. In fact, it’s a film about a woman who has the tragic misfortune of loving the wrong man. Dolan captures this beautifully in one of the film’s publicity stills. It’s a closeup of Fred’s and Laurence’s first embrace when they reunite after being separated for several years. Clément is at the center of the frame, her face buried in Poupaud’s neck. His head is turned away from the camera, so all of our attention is drawn to Clément’s red hair and to her eyes, which are closed. That image is melodrama reduced to its essence. Even Sirk would have approved.

Whether that shift — from this being a film about Laurence to a film about Fred — was intentional or not, I don’t know, but it happens pretty quickly. The first glimpse we get of conflict in their relationship is a scene in a car, when Laurence becomes annoyed by Fred’s spontaneous decision to change their dinner plans and accuses her of driving drunk. Clément powers through with the same silly excitement she had before but there’s a new tension in her jaw. It’s a subtle gesture that communicates palpably the sense that this was not the first time his words had cut her. Later, after a showy scene in which Fred screams at a waitress for patronizing Laurence (this is the clip we would have seen on the Oscars had Clément been nominated), she returns to her apartment, runs a bath, and then suddenly, willfully shuts off the pain. Clément is arresting and heartbreaking in that moment. She turns Fred’s stoicism into a practiced effort, as if she has done this a hundred times before. In the process, Clément embodies Fred’s emotional life and gives her a past.

This ability to express simultaneous and contradictory emotions is what sets Clément apart from other performers in Dolan’s films. She actively resists being just a bauble in his designs, in the same way — and I know this is a strange analogy — Timothy Carey brings a kinetic spontaneity to Kubrick’s otherwise meticulous Paths of Glory. (2013 Muriel winner Matthew McConaughey has a wonderful knack for this as well.) I especially like a moment when Fred drags (no pun intended) her sister into a wig shop, with the intention of surprising Laurence with a gift. The sister character exists in order to express out loud every frustration, doubt, and objection that Fred feels herself but is working so hard to suppress. “Our generation can take this!” Fred says, trying to convince herself it’s true. Clément is so charged by the competing emotions, she begins to bounce on her toes. For a brief second, she even slips out of the tight frame. It’s one of the rare moments in Laurence Anyways that expresses what should always be at the heart of this story: love, recklessness, and potential.

CON

]]>http://www.longpauses.com/iffr-2014/feed/0Anticipating Rotterdamhttp://www.longpauses.com/anticipating-rotterdam/
http://www.longpauses.com/anticipating-rotterdam/#commentsTue, 21 Jan 2014 20:16:33 +0000http://www.longpauses.com/?p=3841After making ten trips to TIFF, I thought I’d gotten pretty good at navigating a massive film program, but International Film Festival Rotterdam is something else entirely. If we count shorts individually, IFFR must be showing more than 400 films over the next ten days, and unlike Toronto, which is a marketplace as much as a festival, the vast majority of the films in Rotterdam’s program have exceedingly limited commercial opportunities. In other words, even with the proliferation of streaming video and other small-scale distribution channels, next week will likely be my only chance to see many of these films.

The following is my first pass at a schedule. I’m splitting my time between auteur films that I’m eager to see on a big screen (Hard to be a God, Jealousy, What now? Remind me), experimental shorts programs, the Nils Malmros retrospective, and an assortment of other things that caught my eye.

I’m interested, primarily, in one aspect of this film. I saw Blue is the Warmest Color projected onto a large screen in a wide ratio (2.35:1). If IMDb is to be trusted, it was shot on a Canon C300, and the resulting image is uncannily detailed in that too-real-to-feel-real style of hi-def video. Because Kechiche frames nearly every shot in a tight closeup (an unusual move, generally, but especially so in this aspect ratio), and because of the film’s 179-minute run time, watching Blue is the Warmest Color in a theater means spending more than two hours looking at faces through a telescope. When my attention drifted from the content of the film, as it did fairly often, I’d distract myself by looking at Léa Seydoux’s teeth and gums or at the warts on the back of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s hand. (This is a cinephile’s prerogative. We are habitual voyeurs, and there are few opportunities in real life for this kind of intimate examination.)

After the screening, I mentioned on Twitter that Blue is the Warmest Color felt like a film that was designed to be viewed on an iPad, and someone countered that it’s not too different in that respect from The Passion of Joan of Arc or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, two other films that rely heavily on closeups. I agree with him to a certain extent, but I think Blue is the Warmest Color is an interesting test case for a directing technique that is categorically different from the work of Dreyer and Leone. I say “technique” rather than “style” or “voice” because I suspect Kechiche’s choices could be reproduced by most competent technicians to similar effects (and likely will in coming years). It could be reduced to something along the lines of: extensive use of hi-def closeups + interesting faces (casting) + duration + realistic performances = the manufacture of feeling. I can’t think of a perfect precedent for this combination.

Obviously, Blue can be distinguished from a film like The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly in many, many ways but I’m most interested in its “realistic performances,” by which I mean the genuine tears, the dripping snot, the flushed skin. Watching 18-year-old Exarchopoulos exhaust herself in scene after scene, I thought of Catherine Breillat’s comment about Isabelle Huppert: “Her gift is to be involved with her character just in the time she is playing it, and without protection. Actors are well paid but it is very dangerous work.” Throughout Blue is the Warmest Color I was too conscious of the likelihood that after Kechiche said “cut,” Exarchopoulos would need an hour to regain her composure.

I was moved by Blue is the Warmest Color, as I’m often moved by coming-of-age stories, but I don’t trust my response because the film’s form is so calculated. (I don’t trust the film because of some narrative cheats, too, but they’re tangential to this discussion.) In a nutshell, I suppose I’m wondering here if it’s possible to project 60-foot, detailed images of Adèle Exarchopoulos’s emotive face for two hours and not move an audience? More to the point, I’m wondering if that technique, in and of itself, can be called directing? Yes, Kechiche made important decisions—the elliptical editing is occasionally interesting, as are some of his storytelling choices—and he was able to elicit those large emotions from Exarchopoulos, which is one of the jobs of a director. But in all of the commotion about Kechiche’s alleged exploitation of his actresses in the filming of the sex scenes, I hear a more vague and general distrust of the film’s voice—a distrust I share because I feel manipulated by a technique devoid of a guiding wit or wisdom.

Since its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2013, Ramon Zürcher’s feature-length debut, The Strange Little Cat, has done a tour of more than two dozen of the world’s most prestigious fests, including Cannes, Toronto, Vienna and now AFI FEST. It’s rare to find a young filmmaker with such a distinct, mature voice, and even rarer to stumble upon a film that so generously rewards post-screening discussions and multiple viewings. It’s a small gem, a film that tells a familiar story in a genuinely new way.

The Strange Little Cat is set almost entirely in a Berlin apartment, where an extended family has gathered to prepare and enjoy a meal together. The main character – if it’s fair to call her that – is the mother of the family who is hosting the party. She’s middle-aged, attractive, and by turns delighted by and indifferent to her family, including her husband, their two older children who have returned home for the occasion, and a young daughter. Throughout the course of their day, various members of the family tell deeply felt stories – reveries, really – that fall on deaf ears, and it becomes increasingly obvious that there is an unacknowledged tension between them.

- – -

Blake Williams is a doctoral candidate in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto and a video artist whose work has screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Pacific Film Archive. Darren Hughes is a communications director at the University of Tennessee and a freelance critic. The following is an edited version of a recent conversation they had about The Strange Little Cat. It’s fair to say that both have been unusually obsessed with this film for the better part of the last year.

- – -

HUGHES: How many times have you seen The Strange Little Cat?

WILLIAMS: Three times all the way through. The last time was at a press screening in late August, before the Toronto International Film Festival began.

HUGHES: How did your impression of it change with each viewing?

WILLIAMS: About two months had passed between my first viewing, which was an online screener, and my second at Cannes, where it was playing in the sidebar called ACID. I remembered a few details: the song, “Pulchritude,” what the mother looked like, and what kind of cat it was. Loosely, I remembered there was a dinner and that a hacky sack came through the window at one point.

But pretty much everything about the movie – even though I had really liked it – was very foreign the second time. I felt like I was watching a different film, and one that left an even stronger emotional resonance. There are very few films I can watch repeatedly and have a different experience with each time, but this has ended up being one of them.

HUGHES: You had an emotional response?

WILLIAMS: Yes!

HUGHES: What were you responding to?

WILLIAMS: This will probably be a long answer to a short question, but here we go: one thing I think the film does is set up scenes and little moments that are about building up pressure. A bottle of fizzy water hums and whistles because it contains effervescent water; they release the cap and the bottle makes a “sssss” sound, or, later, the cap just blows right off and knocks out a light bulb. In an early scene the mother comments on the older daughter having a pimple on her face that she popped and so it’s become very noticeable. The kids play Connect Four, which is a game in which the pieces mount up on top of each other in a kind of chaos, until there’s an alignment, the game ends, and the pieces get released from the bottom. And, of course, the scene with the sausage, which squirts on the uncle’s shirt.

The best example, though, is a bit different from the others because it isn’t about a literal build up of pressure, but an emotional one. A few minutes into the film, the mother tells a story about going to the movies with the grandmother. At the theater, she gets stuck in a strange position – the grandmother’s fallen asleep on her right and the stranger to her left has rested his foot against hers. She can’t move her foot because she’s waited too long and now it’d be awkward to move it, having not done so immediately. So she just sits there, stuck and imposed upon, growing more uncomfortable, until a trumpet blast in the film wakes up the grandmother. This allows everyone to shift and reposition themselves, releasing them from the hold-up they’ve been caught in.

I think the overall structure of the movie constitutes a similar build-up. In one of the last shots in the film the grandmother is sleeping in a back room and the cat comes in, steps over her, and then walks off screen. The next shot is a close-up of the cat, which falls asleep, and the sound of its purring swells and consumes the entire soundtrack. That particular moment for me was a kind of release, which I want to say was almost a phenomenological moment of pure sense experience. A subliminal tension had been building throughout the movie and there it all came rushing out.

That’s where I found the emotional core to the movie, where it became more than what I’d seen on the first viewing, which was “just” a Tati-esque Rube Goldberg machine with fun sounds and quirky moments – very pleasurable but, in a way, a little trivial.

HUGHES: It’s remarkable how similar our experiences were. I remember being impressed by the filmmaking and charmed by, as you said, its Tati-esque qualities. But on the second viewing, I was overwhelmed by it all. There’s so much hostility and anxiety just beneath the surface of every scene.

WILLIAMS: There’s a kind of amicable cruelty constantly on display throughout the movie, where characters are obviously very annoyed with one another, inexplicably mean to one another, but their responses are always counter-intuitively forgiving and accepting. There are a number of occasions where one character slaps another, and it’s always received with a smile – a genuine smile, as if they needed that slap.

HUGHES: When I revisited the film, I had no memory of the mother slapping the younger daughter, Clara. By the third viewing, I was worried for her. The way Clara’s treated, and her response to the situation, made me truly anxious.

Part of it, I think, is that the first time we see Clara, she’s sitting at the kitchen table, letting out one of her piercing, wide-mouthed screams. I suppose we could add that image to your list of pressure build-ups and releases, because as soon as her mother turns off the kitchen blender, Clara stops screaming, giggles, and goes back to doodling on her piece of paper. The Strange Little Cat is so quiet and so still, and characters tend to keep their emotions in check, so Clara’s scream is like a burst of expressionism that stains the surface-level geniality.

WILLIAMS: The acting in this film is being compared with Robert Bresson, which is, I think, a shorthand way of describing the very mechanical style of the performances. Something I’ve felt more with each viewing of the film is that many of the characters are almost technological, like automatons. They move from one very still pose into another in a very swift and exact motion, blinking and smirking and turning their heads with an extreme precision. It’s uncanny, really, and almost literally so. The uncanny was often attributed to the experience of looking at something that looks human but is revealed, on closer inspection, to not be. Even the word, from the German “Unheimlich,” directly translates to “unhomely,” so there is something unsettling with the characters’ robotic motions, and it creates a wonderful tension set against the domesticity of the mise-en-scène.

HUGHES: Yeah, generally speaking, the camera in The Strange Little Cat tends to focus on one character – Clara sitting at the end of the kitchen table, for example – and that character is oddly robotic, as you say. Meanwhile, the other bodies moving back and forth around him or her are more natural and recognizably human. And I mean “bodies” literally. I’ve never seen so many “headless” torsos pass through a frame.

I especially like the portraits of the mother. To drop a few more big names, they’re almost like something you’d see in a Carl Dreyer or Andrei Tarkovsky film. At key moments, Zürcher will cut to her in a still pose. She’s always lost in thought, isolated, with an inscrutable expression on her face. But all around her, people are mending buttons or fixing washing machines or making grocery lists. I can’t think of another filmmaker who combines those two radically different styles of performance in a single scene. And I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it could work.

WILLIAMS: There are so many aspects of this film – and of Zürcher’s short films as well – that I wouldn’t expect to work but do. Any self-respecting film student will challenge himself to go against textbook theories and forms for how to make a film the “proper” way, but that usually results in dumb little exercises that only reinforces why the theory or form became a convention in the first place. I think it’s fair to call Zürcher’s work thus far “exercises” because there’s a sense that he’s working through very formal ideas that are also very theoretical, and he doesn’t mind eliding “plot” entirely.

HUGHES: I wonder how intentionally theoretical it is for Zürcher? When I stumble upon a young filmmaker who has such a distinct voice, I’m tempted to chalk it up as intuition. You know, “Give this guy a camera and these are the kinds of images he’ll make. Give him a blank page and this is the kind of dialog he’ll write.”

And yet, as you said, he’s blatantly refusing to abide by the basic rules of film grammar. I’m especially fascinated by the way he avoids using traditional eye-line matches. There’s a sequence early on when the father and Clara leave to go grocery shopping. The apartment is finally quiet, and Zürcher cuts to the mother, who’s framed beautifully by light from the kitchen window. It’s the first of those portraits I was talking about. We get to just stare at her for a few seconds. The shot functions as a kind of glimpse into her subjectivity, but Zürcher doesn’t cut to a tighter close-up or to her perspective as we would expect. We never see what she’s staring at or get a better sense of what is going through her mind. Instead, Zürcher cuts to her son, who’s staring at her, unnoticed, from the other side of the room. It’s an eye-line match in reverse! The portrait of the mother is also his subjective perspective.

WILLIAMS: And I wonder if that doesn’t happen by accident. When I watched the film again after you noted the lack of eye-line matches, it felt as if he were actively resisting the impulse to make those matches. The fact that he almost never does, and that the film works perfectly well despite it – I’d just be surprised to find out that he’s not self-consciously avoiding certain expectations.

HUGHES: I’m always surprised when The Strange Little Cat ends after only 72 minutes because I feel like I’ve spent more time than that with the characters. There’s an emotional complexity that just doesn’t seem possible in a film so short. And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it’s a consequence of these little formal moves we’re describing.

Each time the film cuts from a portrait to an unexpected image of a spectator, we’re dropped into a kind of loop, where we’re forced to make sense of this new shot – the son on the other side of the kitchen, for example – and at the same time we also have to cycle back to the previous shot, re-contextualize it, and create a new association between the two images and between the two characters. This isn’t Claire Denis’ style of subjectivity where we get an intimate experience of the emotional and psychological lives of the characters. That cut is, in some ways, our best glimpse into the relationship between the mother and son, and it’s totally opaque.

This process that we’re forced into, of re-evaluating every image immediately after it’s gone, is such an interesting tactic. You and I are talking about this in a very removed, theoretical way, but it’s a deeply human, empathetic act. I wish I knew more about cognitive psychology because I’m sure the “loop” I’m trying to describe is a standard notion.

WILLIAMS: This will seem like a stretch at first, but, in that sense I think there are interesting similarities between Zürcher’s films and some of David Cronenberg’s. Cronenberg also often has a layered theoretical framework that is rendered human at the end. I’ve been thinking of him lately in particular because he’s made two films, The Fly (1986) and Naked Lunch (1991), that are deeply indebted to Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” and I was taken aback to learn that The Strange Little Cat is influenced by it as well.

In Kafka’s story, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find that he’s turning into an insect, and the crucial problem of “The Metamorphosis” is that he’s stuck at this point between being truly human and becoming fully insect. In a way, that place of being stuck links back to what I think is the fundamental theme of Zürcher’s film. These characters are in a kind of flux or limbo. Or you could say they’re between two subjectivities.

You used the word “hostility” earlier. People in The Strange Little Cat aren’t comfortable with themselves or with each other. They speak to each other, but they don’t listen to one another. If someone asks a question, they’re almost always given a one-word answer. “Yes.” “Right.” It’s all a very utilitarian way of maintaining their relationships.

In a way, I almost think his project with this film, as it relates to “The Metamorphosis,” is this kind of not really knowing where you are or why you’re there or how to get back to where you were or how to get onto the next stage. The reason the mother ends up being such a tragic figure is because her family seems to be in a transitory or ruptured state, and she seems to not really know where to go with that. From an emotional standpoint, there’s this sense that she’s in two places at once, or stuck trying to get between subjectivities, and nothing is really progressing in either direction.

HUGHES: Each time I watch the film, the reverie sequences become more moving and dramatic. The mother with her trips to the restaurant, the daughter with her orange peels, the son with the drunk girl at the party. These characters are telling stories that are clearly of deep significance to the teller. Each story is such a desperate effort to share something with the people around them. I mean, the poor niece who shows up with her cello tries to tell a story about reading a book at the swimming pool, and she can’t even get to the end of it because people keep interrupting her. It’s just brutal.

WILLIAMS: There’s a wonderful scene in Zürcher’s short film, I Like This Song Today (2007), in which a young woman tells a story about sitting on a train and seeing a man with a ponytail. It’s only after she notices his reflection in the window that she realizes she’s actually looking at two people, the man and a woman in front of him. The woman with the ponytail is blocked from the main character’s perspective, but someone who’d have been sitting right next to her would have had no problem seeing that it was actually two people. In Zürcher’s films, there’s an absurdity and also a kind of tragedy in this limited subjectivity.

I think that’s why the shot of the cat is so moving. The cat is as close as we come to an objective observer. The cat isn’t prone to feeling the chaos or the tension or the family drama or the cruelty happening in front of it. If someone is slapped and smiles immediately afterward, it’s just a completely removed observation. Somehow, having this close-up of a cat as it falls asleep, going from a conscious to unconscious state, provides a closure to that entire dilemma that the film sets up.

HUGHES: That’s a nice analysis of the cat shot, but again it’s fairly theoretical and intellectual. When you saw the film, your response was primarily emotional.

WILLIAMS: Right. Earlier I described that moment of seeing the cat as a phenomenological experience. The way you respond to a film will almost always be emotional, and whether or not you take to that emotional response will dictate the amount of effort you’ll make to intellectualize your experience. So I would say that as a response to the very strange feelings and the swell of emotions I experienced at the sight of that cat . . . well, I want to understand why.

It’s similar to the experience I have when I watch Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987), a simple film about a child returning a notebook to his classmate who he knows will get in trouble if he doesn’t do his homework. The very last shot is of the teacher flipping through the child’s notebook, and just before the film cuts to black and the credits start to roll we see a dried flower that has been placed between two pages. Most of the people I know who’ve seen that film, the moment they see that flower there’s this rush of adrenaline and emotion that is pre-conceptual, experienced before there’s even been a chance to mentally process what’s been seen. It goes from the screen straight to the viscera.

HUGHES: The old Walter Pater line, “All art aspires to the condition of music.”

WILLIAMS: Exactly. I’m knee-deep in all of this at the moment because of some research I’m doing in grad school, thinking about new ways of interpreting emotion and experience. Anyway, so, the cat. I don’t know if it’s tapping into some primal thing that’s lodged in my brain after millions of years of evolution or if it’s something else. {Laughs} But I want to put it into words.

HUGHES: There’s a scene near the end when the lights go out unexpectedly, and the aunt starts taking pictures. . . .

WILLIAMS: I always forget about that scene! When I watched the film in the cinema, I was struck by how the flashes of light were actually pretty harsh to look at. I would feel it physically in my eyeballs because they had adjusted to the darkness.

HUGHES: See, that’s why I mentioned it, and it’s one of the things I’d like to be able to explain better. What is happening to me, the viewer, when I’m hit by those flashes of light? It’s partly physical, right? I mean, The Strange Little Cat is an audience-friendly narrative film, but that’s an avant-garde move – a kind of borrowing from flicker films.

WILLIAMS: Zürcher does seem drawn to pure aesthetic moments like that. There are these transformations that occur where the narrative goes from being a film about process to a film about watching visual phenomena happen on the screen. In his short film Reinhardtstrasse (2009), there’s a scene where the main character is standing outside of a bedroom, listening to music. Colorful light is flowing out of the room and landing on her face, bathing over her. We watch her dance for a minute or two, and it’s really . . . pleasant.

HUGHES: I’ve probably watched that scene nine times. {Laughs}

WILLIAMS: It’s so great. So, the aunt with her camera, then, is both a moment of visual phenomena happening on screen and another example of a limited subjectivity that isn’t shared. She takes a photo and then that image flashes momentarily on her camera’s screen. But we never see it, so I feel like I’m being denied a certain perspective. She even seems to take a number of photos of people or objects that are outside of the frame, so it’s another way of addressing the extra-cinematic space.

HUGHES: Zürcher does that with sound as well. A couple years ago I interviewed James Benning about his film Twenty Cigarettes (2011), which is a portrait series in which each subjects lights, smokes, and discards a single cigarette. I asked him why he staged each person in front of a two-dimensional background – a wall, for example – and he said it was because he wanted sound to open up three-dimensional space. I was reminded of that conversation a few minutes into my first viewing of The Strange Little Cat, because the same thing happens in that cramped little kitchen. The camera is fixed on one person, but the rest of the space in the room is created by the soundtrack.

We keep circling back to a theme, I think, which is that Zürcher’s formal decisions all make the viewer an active participant in the creation of characters, the creation of relationships, the creation of physical space. You can’t sit passively with this film. He just won’t let you.

]]>http://www.longpauses.com/the-strange-little-cat-2013/feed/0Frederick Wiseman: Reasoned Argumentshttp://www.longpauses.com/frederick-wiseman/
http://www.longpauses.com/frederick-wiseman/#commentsMon, 30 Sep 2013 20:06:28 +0000http://www.longpauses.com/?p=3892This interview was originally posted at Senses of Cinema.]]>This interview was originally posted at Senses of Cinema.

* * *

Frederick Wiseman’s second documentary, High School (1968), was at the time of its release an unprecedented glimpse into America’s public education system. Throughout his career, Wiseman has bristled at the terms used to describe his style—direct cinema, “fly on the wall,” cinema-verite—but his decision to observe teacher-student interactions from a position of apparent objectivity upended the traditional models of non-fiction filmmaking. Rather than a top-down statement of administrative priorities, High School is a kind of tangential conversation between Philadelphia teenagers and the adults who were charged with educating and enculturating them. As a result High School remains compelling today. The film is a time capsule of a tumultuous moment in American history, to be sure, but it’s too human and too deeply felt to ever become a dusty museum piece.

Forty-five years later, Wiseman’s influence on documentary filmmaking is inescapable. Yet no one makes films quite like his, and certainly not as well or with as much intelligence and curiosity. In 2010, Wiseman arrived on the campus of The University of California, Berkeley, intent on adding another feature to his on-going series about institutions. He happened to start the project during the darkest days of America’s economic recession, when state legislatures across the country were divesting in public education. At Berkeley is a four-hour, wide-ranging portrait of that moment. He and his small crew spent time with university administrators, with student protesters, and in a variety of classrooms and research facilities. “The movie is what I felt about Berkeley,” he told me.

I spoke with Frederick Wiseman at the Toronto International Film Festival, where At Berkeley received its North American premiere.

* * *

I should start by saying that I’m a cinephile and fan of your work, but like a lot of film writers today, I do this as a freelancer. In my day job, I’m communications director for the University of Tennessee Foundation, where I spend most of my time reminding the people of Tennessee, our alumni, and the state’s legislators about the importance of public higher education.

Oh, well, then you’re familiar with all of the issues!

Yeah, this might be a bit of shoptalk for me.

That’s interesting. That’s fine. Get them to show the film in Tennessee.

Is that an option? Your films typically show in the States on PBS. Do you have other distribution plans in mind?

Yeah, it’ll be shown on PBS in January, but it’s not the same thing. It’s much better to see it projected. It’s opening commercially in New York, and it’s being booked around the country. I’m hoping the film gets booked in state universities because the issues are the same everywhere.

When you were here in Toronto a couple years ago with Boxing Gym (2010), you said during the Q&A that one reason you were drawn to the gym was because the guy who ran it was such a good teacher.

Richard Lord, yeah. I thought Richard was a great teacher and a great psychologist because he knew how to deal with the people in the gym.

I would guess that 30-40% of the new film is teachers in the classroom, which is a rare sight in films—I mean, to really get to watch people do the hard work of teaching and mentoring.

I’m interested in teaching, and I’ve observed teaching in a variety of circumstances, not only the high school movies and Boxing Gym but Near Death (1989), where you see the senior physicians introducing the residents and the interns to a variety of ways of dealing with people—and the families of people—who are dying. I mean, it’s an obvious consequence of making movies in institutions where knowledge is being passed on.

And Berkeley has great teachers, so that was certainly part of the attraction to this subject. I was making a film about a university, so I wanted to show teaching in action.

Another perk of shooting at Berkeley is that you have very articulate subjects. I assume that was part of the attraction too?

Well, sure, because sometimes I’ve had very inarticulate subjects! A necessity for a good teacher is the ability to talk clearly and convincingly on a subject. The faculty at Berkeley is something like 3,500 people and there are 5,000 courses, so there was a lot to choose from, and I make no claims in the film that it is a representative sample, because I don’t know how to do that.

One of the men in the film—maybe he was a vice chancellor?—says, “The coin of the realm is articulate argumentation.”

The provost. Yeah, a crucial statement. Reasoned argument.

You arrived in Berkeley during the recession, when the California legislature was accelerating its divestment in public higher education. It all felt eerily familiar to me. In 2008, about 27% of University of Tennessee’s operating revenue came from state appropriations. By 2012, it had dropped to 18%.

Berkeley was at 16% when I made the film; it’s now 9%. Really, it’s becoming a type of privatization. It’s complicated because the states’ economies are in bad shape, but also I think there’s a . . . you know more about this than I do . . . but I have a sense that there’s, well, two things: One, there’s an effort to apply a cost-benefit analysis to courses, so if there’s only six people taking Portuguese, why offer Portuguese, or if there are ten people in a political science class and 500 people in an engineering class, why do we need political science?

But there’s also a political . . . there may be, I don’t know if I’m right . . . but there may be a political agenda behind that. In a sense, dumbing down the nature of the education so people aren’t aware of the historical aspects and traditions of the United States, or the way the government is supposed to work, or what the founders had in mind with the Federalist Papers, blah, blah, blah. And that’s very dangerous.

Pat McCrory, the governor of North Carolina, recently said, “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school, and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.” In a single stroke, he dismissed the grand tradition of classic liberal arts education.

Yeah, it is dismissing it. That’s the point. But the question is whether that’s just for economic reasons or whether it’s a political agenda behind it, and I don’t want to answer that question.

You’re implying you think there is.

I think for some people. I mean, the Koch brothers, for example, have an interest in that sort of thing. I’m not just implying it. I think for some people there is that agenda. How widespread it is, I don’t know.

Fitting, then, that you would choose Berkeley as your subject. That campus, probably more than any other in America, has a tradition of inter-generational conflict and direct political action. The ghost of Mario Savio haunts your film in complicated ways.

See, but that’s interesting, because one of the things I discovered while I was there was that most students, I mean 85-90% of the students, don’t participate in those things. But because of what was going on in the ‘60s, there’s this myth about Berkeley. My guess is that even in the ‘60s most of the students weren’t participating. And certainly not now.

It’s interesting, though, that the very thing that Savio was railing against nearly 50 years ago—the collaboration between public higher education and the military-industrial complex—is perhaps even more prominent today.

And part of that is a consequence of the lack of funding. The state funding has been replaced by research funding—sometimes by large corporations, sometimes by the military. But I must say, my impression was at Berkeley that when they took that kind of funding there were no strings attached. They went where the research led them, not where the funder wanted them to be. They weren’t producing results to support the point of view of the funder.

Every time you cut away to a construction project on campus, I imagined a new building going up with a donor’s name on it. I was hoping the film would touch on the role of private gift support.

I couldn’t get access to it.

Really?

Yeah.

Interesting. So, what was your process for getting access to the university?

Generally speaking, I had access to everything that was going on except insofar as somebody didn’t want to be photographed. But the person in charge of fundraising thought that it would interfere.

I’m sure it would.

So I didn’t have access to that. Despite the fact that the final film . . . they love the final film. There’s a reception this afternoon for Berkeley alumni in Toronto, who are going to be shown excerpts and be told about the film.

That’s great. Doesn’t surprise me at all.

[Smiles] Well, because it came out alright, from their point of view.

I know you’ve talked about this a lot over the years, but how do you find the shape of a film like this? What are your shooting and editing habits?

I just figure it out. I mean, there are no rules. For instance, within a sequence I have to feel that I understand what’s going on, and then I have to decide what I think is most important. Then I have to figure out a way of shaping the sequence, editing it down, summarizing it, synthesizing it in a way that is fair to the original even though it’s much shorter than the original.

I mean, a sequence in real time might be an hour and a half. Some of those cabinet meetings were an hour and a half, two hours. In the film, it’s six, seven, eight minutes. I have to edit them so they appear as if they took place the way you’re watching it, even though it’s 30 seconds here, five seconds there, and then I jump twenty minutes ahead. But I have to edit in such a way that it looks like it all happened the way you’re watching it.

So that’s within the sequence. Between the sequences I have to figure out the overarching themes and the dramatic moments. An abstract way of describing what I tried to do is I tried to cut it at right angles so you’re always surprised by what comes next. And at the same time, in terms of the rhythm of the movie, I have to think about quiet moments. I mean, after a dramatic scene I don’t want to go to another dramatic scene, so I may use cutaways of the campus or whatever.

But when I use cutaways to the campus, I use them for a variety of purposes: sometimes to show movement from one place to another, other times because I need a quiet moment, or it might be that I want to show that everyone has a cell phone. Particularly for those transition shots, there are multiple purposes.

In those shots, you’re also making very specific choices about how to depict the campus.

That’s true of everything.

Sure. So, occasionally we see people working in corporate-style offices, for example, but you also return often to a large lobby or foyer . . . I’m not sure what it is exactly, but it has beautiful Spanish arches.

Right, right.

And in those aesthetic choices of representation you’re also adding your voice to the film. Is that fair to say?

Sure, because I want to show the architecture. I want to show the students sitting on the floor. I like the shot of the light coming down through the arches. I need a transition between two classes. All of those things are elements in the choice of that shot or that group of shots.

Okay, but a beautiful shot of light coming down through those arches also brings a point of view to the film. Yesterday I was discussing this with a friend who described At Berkeley as very fly-on-the-wall and free of advocacy . . .

There is no advocacy. “Fly on the wall” is a term I object to. There was no advocacy going on in the sense that I never asked anybody to do anything.

Just from talking to you face-to-face, though, I get the sense that you’ve become invested in the subject. Would you describe yourself as an advocate for higher education?

I’d describe myself as a filmmaker. I mean, I think I’ve realized as a consequence of making this film—I don’t think I ever thought much about public education before I made the film—but as a consequence of the experience, and having the opportunity to listen to these administrators at Berkeley discuss these issues, I learned something about the issue.

The project originated because I thought a university would be a good addition to the series I’ve been doing on institutions. It’s a natural consequence of doing High School, and universities are important in American society, in any society. So the impetus for doing the film had more to do with wanting to do a movie that fit into the institutional series. But I wanted to pick a public university because that raised more issues.

One storyline in the film is Berkeley’s effort to reduce spending through operational excellence and process engineering. It’s probably my favourite aspect of the film—and I’ve never really thought about my own university in this context—because in that sense, the campus becomes a microcosm of post-recession America . .

Right.

Where the lowest wage earners . . .

They’re the ones who get . . . yeah.

There’s a scene where students are discussing the cost of attending Berkeley, and a middle-class girl breaks down . . .

She cries.

She feels the same squeeze experienced by so many over the past five years. Were you surprised to find that connection?

I was surprised only in the sense that I was ignorant of the issues. But having had access to so much of what was going on at the university, I’m less ignorant.

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau is a compelling character on screen. I imagine when you meet people like him, you must think, “This guy will help the film. We have something here.”

He’s the one who gave me permission to make it. He was the first person I met. He was the person I contacted in order to get permission.

Was he aware of your work?

Yeah.

So that helps.

Yeah, he was aware of the films, and he was very open. I wrote him a letter, basically saying, “Can I make a documentary of Berkeley?” and explaining the circumstances and the funding and all that, and he wrote me back, “Come and see me.” I went to see him, and I had lunch with him and the provost, and at the end of the lunch they said, “Okay.”

That was a tremendous risk for them.

Oh, it was. We talked about that. But, you know, obviously he trusted me. He told me explicitly at the end, when it was over and he saw the movie, he was glad his trust was not misplaced. The movie is what I felt about Berkeley. If I’d felt something else about it, it would’ve been in the movie.

He seems to have that rare talent to make very difficult decisions but to do so with tact and wisdom.

Well, he’d been a dean at MIT and president at the University of Toronto before he went to Berkeley. He’s a very smart man and had a lot of experience.

I enjoyed watching his response to the student protestors because he’s sympathetic to them—just like I’m sympathetic to them—but his biggest frustration is that there’s so little at stake for them.

Right. And he compares it to his own experience in the ‘60s. I think he’s also concerned, basically, about their ignorance of the real situation.

Part of my job is public relations, and nothing is more frustrating than when the other side gets the basic, underlying facts wrong.

It was amazing to me how badly wrong they got them at Berkeley, because to make a principled demand for free tuition at this point . . . it’s a fantasy. It wasn’t a question of the university withholding. Free tuition just wasn’t in the cards.

In the film, at least, Chancellor Birgeneau’s heart seems to be in the right place.

Exactly! I’m glad to hear you say that. That’s exactly how I felt. One of the interesting things for me about making the film was that I was with a group of people who cared. I think that’s just as important a subject for a film as people who are callous and indifferent.

Because of where I sit in my job, I’ve seen all sides of those debates . .

Right.

. . . and I can say that it’s very rare to meet someone who has dedicated his or her life to higher education and not cared deeply about it. It was nice to see that on film.